I'm actually doing this now. We're using jekyll for a tablet magazine site with several non technical staff using github and prose to manage the content.
It's actually going fairly well. There have definitely been some issues, but it's been great.
I'm curious about why people jump on angular without even checking out knockoutjs. Knockout provides similar functionality with slightly less code. The demo/doc site is incredible.
I think it is also interesting that since backbone all the hot front end frameworks are of the model binding variety. Honestly when you do stuff like angular or knockout backbone just feels clunky.
I know that there are model binding plugins for backbone, but you still end up writing a bunch more code.
Jekyll just generates static html, so you can host it anywhere.
Honestly, this is the best suggestion, here. You can build anything you want with jekyll and never have to worry about stupid mysql/php crap ever again.
Customizing it with less is really pretty straightforward.
You can also generate custom css from the website. Just click the customize tab in the topbar. You can bump up @baseFontSize. 16px works very well. You might also want to increase the @baseLineHeight a bit as well.
I may be biased, but I'd second the nominations for Portland, Oregon. A lot of interesting things are happening. Acquisitions and funding have been intense. Check out the list:
http://aaronparecki.com/Portland_Funding_and_Acquisitions
I would never have thought that MySQL could handle massive databases, but it honestly isn't that bad. You just can't expect it to behave like a normal database.
I had to use mysql to build a 200 million row 200gb database. The trick was using myisam and indexing it as little as possible (just the pk). I used sphinx to handle full text searching. Searching and retrieving records was very fast.
I personally would love to see a service like you are talking about.
I recently did an ask hn in search of a payment service and someone else posted a similar question today. Seems like there is some need for that sort of thing.
Any support for multiple languages, yet?